Attention in Psychology

Attention

• Attention refers to the cognitive process that allows us to focus on specific stimuli while ignoring others.
• Main goals of attention:
  • Selective Attention: Focusing on a single stimulus while ignoring others.
  • Divided Attention: The ability to attend to multiple stimuli simultaneously.

Selective Attention

• Dichotic Listening: A task where participants hear different auditory messages in each ear and are instructed to attend to one message and ignore the other.
  • Early Selection Theory: Filters out unattended information at an early stage of processing, based on physical features like pitch or loudness.
    • Colin Cherry and Broadbent's Filter Model: Early filtering occurs, with only the attended message reaching higher levels of processing.
    • Cocktail Party Effect: Ability to focus on one conversation amidst background noise.
    • Dear Aunt Jane Experiment: Participants can notice their own name in the unattended message, suggesting a degree of processing occurs for unattended information.
  • Intermediate Selection Theory: Attention filters information at an intermediate stage, based on meaningful features like language or semantic content.
    • Treisman's Attenuation Theory: Unattended information is weakened (attenuated) but not completely blocked, allowing some information to reach higher levels of processing.
  • Late Selection Theory: Filtering occurs late, after meaning has been extracted.
    • McKay's Late Filter Experiment: Meaning of unattended words influenced participants' interpretation of ambiguous sentences, suggesting semantic processing occurred.
• Load Theory of Attention: The amount of processing required for a task influences how much attention can be dedicated to other tasks.
• Stroop Task: Demonstrates interference between automatic processing (reading) and controlled processing (naming the color of the ink).

Spatial Attention

• Overt Attention: Attending to a stimulus by directly looking at it.
  • No Look Pass: A sports tactic where a player passes the ball without looking at the receiver.
  • Saccades: Rapid eye movements between fixations.
  • Fixations: Periods of stationary eye gaze.
• Covert Attention: Attending to a stimulus without directly looking at it.
  • Posner's Cueing Paradigm: Participants are cued to attend to a location either accurately or inaccurately, highlighting covert attention.
  • Salience: The degree to which a stimulus attracts attention.

Feature-Based and Object-Based Attention

• Spatial Attention: Attention directed to a particular location in space.
• Object-Based Attention: Attention is directed to an object as a whole, rather than just its location.
  • Egly's Object-Based Attention Experiment: Participants responded faster to targets located within the same object, suggesting attention was not solely location-based.
• Feature-Based Attention: Attention directed to a specific feature of a stimulus, like color or shape.
  • Feature Integration Theory: Attention is needed to combine features into coherent objects.

Hemispatial Neglect

• A neurological disorder where individuals ignore information on one side of their visual field.

Short-Term And Working Memory

• Modal Model of Memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin):
  • Sensory Memory: Briefly stores incoming sensory information.
    • Iconic Memory: Visual sensory memory.
    • Echoic Memory: Auditory sensory memory.
  • Short-Term Memory (STM): Briefly holds a limited amount of information that is currently being used.
    • Long-Term Memory (LTM): Stores information relatively permanently.
• Capacity and Duration of Memory Systems:

  Memory System	Capacity	Duration
  Sensory Memory	Large	Very short (milliseconds)
  Short-Term Memory	Limited (7 +/- 2 items)	Seconds to minutes
  Long-Term Memory	Potentially unlimited	Minutes to years

• Sensory Memory:
  • Fragility: Sensory information decays rapidly if not transferred to short-term memory.
• Short-Term Memory:
  • Duration & Decay: Information decays rapidly unless rehearsed.
  • Capacity: Limited to approximately 7 +/- 2 chunks of information.
    • Information Limits: STM capacity can be increased by grouping information into meaningful chunks.
    • Chunking: Organizing information into meaningful units.
• Baddeley & Hitch Model of Working Memory:
  • Phonological Loop: Holds and manipulates auditory information.
    • Phonological Similarity Effect: Similar-sounding items are harder to recall.
    • Word Length Effect: Longer words are harder to recall.
    • Articulatory Suppression: Repetitive speech interferes with verbal memory.
  • Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: Holds and manipulates visual and spatial information.
  • Central Executive: Controls attention, coordinates the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad, and interacts with LTM.
    • Role of Central Executive: Directs, coordinates, and monitors cognitive processes.
• Vogel's Distractor Experiment: Demonstrates that working memory capacity is influenced by the similarity of distractors to target items.
  • Take-Home Message: Similar distractors overload working memory, making it harder to remember target items.
• Long-Term Memory:
  • Interactions with STM: Information from STM can be transferred to LTM through rehearsal and elaborative processing.
    • Serial Position Curve: Better recall for items at the beginning (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) of a list.
      • Primacy Effect: Result of transfer to long-term memory through rehearsal.
      • Recency Effect: Result of items still being present in short-term memory.
    • Wickens' Semantic Interference in WM: Semantic similarity between items in STM can interfere with recall.
• Recall vs. Recognition:
  • Recall: Retrieving information from memory without prompting.
  • Recognition: Identifying information that has been previously encountered.
  • Recall is harder than recognition: Because recall requires generating the information from memory, while recognition only requires matching it to a familiar item.
• H.M. and the Role of the Hippocampus in LTM:
  • H.M.: A famous case study of a patient with severe anterograde amnesia resulting from damage to the hippocampus.
  • Anterograde Amnesia: Inability to form new long-term memories.
  • Hippocampus: Critical for transferring information from STM to LTM, particularly for episodic memories.
• Double Dissociations in Memory:
  • Double Dissociation: A pattern of brain damage where two different functions are affected independently.
  • Take-Home Message: Double dissociations support the idea that different brain regions are involved in different cognitive functions.
  • Examples:
    • K.C.: Anterograde amnesia for episodic memories but intact semantic memories.
    • Italian Woman: Intact episodic memories but impaired semantic memories.
  • Short- vs. Long-Term Memory: Double dissociations show that STM and LTM are distinct systems.
• Penfield's Electrical Stimulation: Electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe during brain surgery elicited vivid memories, highlighting the role of this region in memory retrieval.
• Semanticization of Memory: Over time, personal and emotional details of episodic memories can fade, leaving only the semantic content.
  • Remember/Know Experiments: Participants are asked whether they remember a previously studied item (episodic recall) or if they just know it's familiar (semantic familiarity).
• The Goal of Long-Term Memory: To store information for later use, making it accessible for learning, decision-making, and other cognitive processes.

Explicit vs. Implicit Memory

• Explicit Memory: Conscious recollection of past events or facts.
  • Episodic Memory: Memories for personal experiences.
  • Semantic Memory: Memories for facts and general knowledge.
• Implicit Memory: Memory that influences behavior without conscious recollection.
  • Repetition Priming: Faster or more accurate processing of items that have been previously encountered.
  • Procedural Memory: Memories for skills and habits.
    • Examples: Riding a bike, typing, playing a musical instrument.
  • Classical Conditioning: Learning to associate a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus.

Attention

• Goal: Allow us to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information.
• Selective Attention: Focusing on a single stimulus or task while ignoring others.
• Divided Attention: Attending to multiple stimuli or tasks simultaneously.
• Dichotic Listening: A task where participants listen to different auditory messages in each ear, and must attend to one message while ignoring the other.
  • Early Selection: Filtering occurs at the sensory level, meaning irrelevant information is disregarded before it is fully processed.
    • Colin Cherry and Broadbent's Filter Model: Proposed that a filter operates on unattended information, blocking it from further processing.
    • Cocktail Party Effect and Dear Aunt Jane Experiment: Demonstrate how we can switch attention to a relevant message even with competing messages.
  • Intermediate Selection: Some information in the unattended channel is processed to a degree, but the meaning is only processed if it becomes relevant.
    • Treisman's Attenuation Theory: Suggests that unattended information is attenuated instead of completely blocked.
  • Late Selection: Filtering happens at the level of meaning, suggesting that all information is processed for meaning regardless of whether it is attended to.
    • McKay's Late Filter Experiment: Shows that unattended information can influence understanding of the attended message when the meanings overlap.
• Load Theory of Attention: Our ability to attend to multiple stimuli or tasks depends on the cognitive load of the task.
• Stroop Task: Assesses the interference between the automatic processing of a word's color and the conscious processing of its ink color.
• Overt vs. Covert Attention (Spatial Attention):
  • Overt Attention: Directly focusing on an object with eye movements.
  • Covert Attention: Focusing on an object without any eye movements.
    • No-Look Pass: Can be both overt and covert depending on the situation.
    • Saccades and Fixations: Usually overt, involving eye movements.
    • Posner's Cueing Paradigm: Shows that covert attention can enhance processing.
• Salience:
• Spatial, Object-, and Feature-Based Attention:
  • Spatial Attention: Focusing on a particular location in space.
  • Object-Based Attention: Focusing on a specific object, even if it moves across different locations. - Egly's Object-Based Attention Experiment: Showed how an object's features are processed more quickly when attention is directed to that object.
  • Feature-Based Attention: Focusing on a specific feature, like color or shape, even if it is not the whole object.
• Hemispatial Neglect: A condition where individuals fail to attend to stimuli on one side of their body or space.
• Feature-Binding and Feature Integration Theory: Explains how we combine different features of an object into a coherent whole.

Short-Term and Working Memory

• Modal Model of Memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin): Proposes a three-stage model of memory: sensory, short-term, and long-term memory.
  • Sensory Memory: A brief, initial stage of memory that holds sensory information.
    • Iconic Memory: Sensory memory for visual information (lasts less than 1 sec).
    • Echoic Memory: Sensory memory for auditory information (lasts a few seconds).
    • Capacity: Extremely large
    • Duration: Very brief
    • Fragility: Quickly decays unless information is rehearsed.
  • Short-Term Memory: A limited-capacity memory system that holds information for a short period of time.
    • Duration: ~15-30 seconds
    • Capacity: 7 ± 2 items (Miller's Rule)
      • Information Limits: Capacity can be increased through chunking.
      • Chunking: Combining smaller bits of information into larger, meaningful units.
  • Long-Term Memory: A relatively permanent memory system that stores information for an extended period of time.
    • Capacity: Very large
    • Duration: Indefinitely
  • Badley and Hitch Model of Working Memory: A more dynamic view of short-term memory, with three key components:
    • Phonological Loop: Responsible for holding and manipulating verbal information.
      • Phonological Similarity Effect: Words that sound alike are harder to remember.
      • Word Length Effect: Shorter words are easier to remember than longer words.
      • Articulatory Suppression: Repeating a word or sound out loud interferes with verbal memory.
    • Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: Responsible for holding and manipulating visual and spatial information.
      • Mental Rotation: The ability to rotate an object mentally.
    • Central Executive: Controls attention and manages the flow of information between the phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, and long-term memory.
  • Vogel's Distractor Experiment: Demonstrates how attentional load can affect working memory performance.
    • Take Home Message: Increased distractor load in working memory tasks leads to worse performance.

Long-Term Memory

• Interactions with Short-Term Memory:
  • Serial Position Curve: Shows that people are more likely to remember items presented first (primacy effect) or last (recency effect) in a list.
    • Primacy Effect: Due to rehearsal and transfer to long-term memory.
    • Recency Effect: Due to items still being in short-term memory.
  • Wickens' Semantic Interference in WM: Demonstrates how semantic similarity can affect short-term memory performance.
• Recall vs. Recognition: Recognition is often easier than recall.
  • Recall: Retrieving information without any cues.
  • Recognition: Identifying information that has been encountered before.
• H.M. and the Role of the Hippocampus in LTM:
  • Anterograde Amnesia: A condition where individuals are unable to form new long-term memories.
  • The hippocampus plays a crucial role in forming new memories, especially in episodic memory.
• Double Dissociations in Memory: Demonstrate how different brain regions are responsible for different types of memory.
  • Episodic vs Semantic Memory:
    • Episodic Memory: Memories of specific events.
    • Semantic Memory: General knowledge about the world.
      • Double Dissociation: Showed that one patient (K.C.) had impaired episodic memory but intact semantic memory, while another patient (Italian Woman) had impaired semantic memory but intact episodic memory.
        • Take Home Message: Different brain regions are responsible for episodic and semantic memory.
  • Short-Term vs Long-Term Memory:
    • The brain areas involved in short-term and long-term memory differ.
• Penfield's Electrical Stimulation: Showed that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions can evoke vivid memories.
• Semanticization of Memory: The process of converting episodic memories over time into semantic memories.
  • Remember/Know Experiments: Ask participants to judge whether they can "remember" a past event or just "know" that it happened, even if not able to recall any specific details.
• The Goal of LTM: To store information that is meaningful and useful for future use.
• Explicit vs Implicit Memory:
  • Explicit Memory (Declarative Memory): Memories that can be consciously recalled.
  • Implicit Memory (Non-declarative Memory): Memories that cannot be consciously recalled but still influence behavior.
    • Repetition Priming: Faster or more accurate processing of a stimulus after prior exposure to the same or similar stimulus.
    • Procedural Memory: The ability to perform learned skills.
    • Classical Conditioning: Learning an association between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus.
• Double Dissociations: Show that different brain regions are responsible for different types of memory.
  • Take Home Message: Double dissociations provide evidence for the functional specialization of brain regions and demonstrate how specific areas are specialized for different cognitive processes.

Explore the cognitive process of attention, including selective and divided attention concepts. This quiz covers key theories such as the Cocktail Party Effect and dichotic listening. Test your understanding of how we focus on specific stimuli while filtering out distractions.